Preface to the Revised Edition
preface
prolog

Ⅰ.
Theology of Money, Urban Individualism: Simmel's Urban Humanities

1.
People who desire the god called 'money'
Monetary Economy and Our Inner World
Theology of Money: “I will give you rest in peace!”
Why We Desire Money

2.
The City, the Individual, and Freedom
The difference between country people and city people
Solitude, the flip side of city life's freedom
Individualism in the big city, that Janus-faced face!

Ⅱ.
Fashion, gambling, prostitution… the giant spotlight of desire: Benjamin's erotic Marxism

3.
Fashion, the dominant mode of capitalism
Benjamin's unfinished project, the "Arcade Project"
Department store or arena of desire and vanity
Fashion and Eroticism

4.
The Psychology of Gambling and Prostitution
Capitalism, the universal gambling den
The Religiousness of Capitalism as Revealed by Gambling
Dreaming of love in prostitution!

Ⅲ.
Transforming the Emotional Universe into a Liberating Universe: Bourdieu's Capitalist Habitus

5.
Why the Miserable Can't Make a Revolution
Habitus and Two Futures
Farming is not labor for them.
Why don't the unemployed and homeless start a revolution?

6.
The logic of vanity that eats away at our inner selves
Kantian Aesthetics vs. Popular Aesthetics
Aesthetic taste, the most stubborn and violent principle of distinction
Human vanity and the temptation of capitalism

Ⅳ.
The Fatal Temptation of Consumption: Baudrillard's General Economics

7.
What we really consume
Keep consuming new things
Why did capitalism develop?
Genealogy of Consumer Society: A Glimpse of Massive Desires

8.
The Path to Delightful Ruin
Symbolic value, the only hope for salvation
Baudrillard's mentor, Bataille
The possibility of impossible exchange

V.
Workers Caught in the Web's Net: Ferraris's Theory of Documentary Media

9.
Smartphones are like yellow submarines
Documentary: The Key to Unraveling the Secrets of Capital
“We are mobilized.
And it is dependent on capital.”
The purpose of capitalism is not surveillance, but consumption.

10.
To exist is to resist
Where are all those workers now?
Bohemian Rhapsody of the Mobilized!
The Dream of Webfair, or the Solitude of Ferraris

Epilogue
References
Search

The fatal wound of 'freedom of consumption'
How to Dream of a New Life Without Getting Lost in Capitalism

“A philosophical person can reflect on ordinary and familiar life in an unfamiliar way.” (p. 20) Capitalist society seems to be more prosperous than ever before and has given people freedom and joy.
However, author Kang Shin-ju says that freedom under capitalism is not true freedom.
The freedom to consume with the money earned through labor, the freedom to sell labor again to earn money to consume, that is, the freedom to be subordinate to money and to obey money.
In the author's view, modern people live their lives as workers and consumers, like hamsters on a wheel.
In front of money, we become smaller and smaller, more and more insignificant, and more and more discouraged.
'Making more money' has become the goal of my life, and I live a life where I am constantly hurt by not being able to earn more, not being able to spend more, and being compared to others.

Behind it all is capitalism.
Capitalist life is so familiar and ordinary that we don't realize how much our lives are tamed by capitalism and how much it hurts us.
The author suggests that we look at capitalism, which endlessly fuels the desire for consumption, with a strange eye.
He emphasizes that only then can we face the lamp of desire created by capitalism and gain the wisdom and courage to confront capitalism, the money that exploits us.


The book features five humanities intellectuals who provide a three-dimensional look at capitalism.
The protagonists are Georg Simmel (Money and the City), Walter Benjamin (Fashion, Gambling, Prostitution), Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction and Habitus), Jean Baudrillard (Consumer Society), and Maurizio Ferraris (Documentary and Web Capitalism).
These are all philosophers who tried to theoretically capture the internal logic of capitalist life.
They are also people who have sought ways to dream of a new life without getting lost in capitalism.
Through their guidance, the book delves into the history of capitalism, which has dominated our lives from the 19th century to the present, and makes us painfully face the extent to which our lives are being damaged by capitalism.
“The reason I chose these five humanities figures in this book is because they alone can provide a three-dimensional look at our capitalist lives.
“With the insights of these five intellectuals, we can now delve into the capitalist life and inner secrets of our wounded protagonist, who is somewhere now soothing a strange sense of emptiness on Instagram or Facebook.” (p. 28)

Simmel: Human desire blossomed along with money and cities.

Part 1, 'Simmel', delves into the bare face of desire in this age of great cities and money.
Georg Simmel, who most thoroughly examined the logic of money after Marx, says that capitalism, supported by a monetary economy, also functions as a kind of secular religion.
In other words, the money of capitalism is the direct successor to the transcendence and inclusiveness of the Christian God.
Just as complete dependence on God and confession of everything brings peace and rest to believers, the more money one accumulates, the more peace and stability one finds in the hearts of modern people.
Simmel provides a sobering diagnosis of how money works and how the monetary economy has specifically changed human beings.
Simmel's diagnosis that money began to intervene between people and objects and between people as the monetary economy developed clearly reveals our reality, where love, friendship, and trust are impossible without money.

Simmel also studied the urban problem, which can be said to be the identical twin of industrial capitalism along with the monetary economy.
Simmel analyzed how humans living in big cities came to have 'freedom' and said that individualism emerged from this.
This individualism is a result of a combination of human vanity, which seeks to distinguish oneself from others, and the consumer society of industrial capitalism that exploits this vanity.
Although it may seem on the surface that freedom to express one's individuality and desires has been realized, it also means that all individuals have been incorporated into the capitalist mode of production.
In other words, without money, individuals cannot properly enjoy any freedom.


Benjamin, fashion, gambling, prostitution… a giant spotlight of desire

Part 2, 'Benjamin', explores aspects of capitalist life such as fashion, prostitution, and gambling.
Benjamin collected a vast amount of material to study 'Paris, the capital of the 19th-century world,' which is contained in his book 'The Arcade Project.'


Studying the arcades of Paris, Benjamin discovers the contradictions of capitalism that distort our desires through fashion, gambling, and prostitution.
First of all, it is clear that arcades and department stores are devices designed to train humans to desire new products.
And through the arcade, it shows how the department store was invented and how it imprinted our desire for fashion.
Benjamin interprets the desire of consumers to purchase goods for their exchange value rather than their use value, or as symbols that satisfy their own pride or vanity.
Benjamin's analysis is that industrial capital constantly creates trends by exploiting these human desires.


What Benjamin pondered was not the rational aspects of capitalism, but the irrational elements, such as human ignorance or religiosity, that lurk behind capitalism.
To be more precise, Benjamin says that the vitality of capitalism lies rather in religiosity itself.
It is in this context that the thorough obedience to the god of money and the psychology of waiting for his grace are what supported capitalism.
And he mentions that gambling and prostitution are the cases that best reveal the characteristics of capitalism as a religion.


“Unlike Marx, Benjamin thought that capitalism itself was both real and imaginary.
If Benjamin's position is correct, the following surprising result is reached:
“Capitalism itself functions as a religion, so if the religious nature of capitalism disappears, capitalism will also be fundamentally abolished.” (p. 159)

Bourdieu, Why Don't the Unemployed or Homeless Make Revolutions?

Part 3, 'Bourdieu', examines our inner world, which has been imprinted by capitalism, including habitus and distinction.
First, Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus to explain why poor people cannot make a revolution.
Bourdieu says there are two types of habitus.
One is the habitus of a person with a future, and the other is the habitus of a person without a future.
Bourdieu explains that people without a future do not show revolutionary tendencies that dream of fundamental changes in their circumstances or new transformations.
In other words, the unemployed and the homeless cannot rationally reflect on the entire system through their own perspective because they do not even have the means to maintain a minimal standard of living.
Bourdieu argues that in order to overcome the oppression of capitalism, poor neighbors must be able to escape at least the extreme threat of livelihood so that the future can become a “field of possibility” for them in the sense that they can choose it themselves.

Bourdieu also analyzes the inner world of the upper class, who claim to have discernment, from various angles using the concept of habitus.
For example, the perspectives on beauty are different between the upper and lower classes.
Bourdieu says that this aesthetic tendency is the most direct and powerful habitus.
However, it is emphasized that this difference between the upper and lower classes is not an innate difference.
In other words, upper-class people forget that their aesthetic ability was created by the money and leisure they had.
In this way, Bourdieu exposes in Distinction that the pure art of the upper class is not pure, and that it comes from the desire to distinguish oneself from the lower class.
However, this does not mean that I approve of the popular art and aesthetic tastes of the lower classes.
“Ultimately, the habitus of the proletariat cannot be an object of affirmation, but rather an object of overcoming.
Because it is the habitus of the ruled, or the habitus of submission.
If a slave's habitus cannot be overcome, even if the master is removed, the slave will seek another good master and try to obey him.
Ultimately, to create a free community, the proletariat must change its habitus.
It would be the habitus of liberation or the habitus of freedom.
“Only then can we prevent the tragedy of the habitus of obedience tumbling into the habitus of domination.” (p. 260)

Baudrillard, The Fatal Temptations of Consumer Society

In Part 4, 'Baudrillard', we consider the seductive logic of consumer society and the possibility of escaping from it.
Baudrillard, who experienced the 1968 revolution with his whole body and mind, finds the driving force of industrial capitalism in ‘consumption.’
He says that the reason industrial capitalism was able to develop so rapidly was not due to the rapid advancement of productivity through technological development, but rather the logic of a consumer society that fuels human vanity and desire.
So how did industrial capitalism open consumers' wallets? What Baudrillard focused on was symbolic value.
This symbolic value also reveals the human desire and vanity to be superior to others and to receive their attention and interest.
Baudrillard says that it is precisely because of these emotions that the symbolic values ​​fabricated by industrial capital can function.

So how can we escape industrial capitalism? Baudrillard finds the way in "impossible exchange."
He talks about the non-exchangeable, or rather, non-exchangeable, things that exist all around us.
It is the logic of symbolic exchange represented by gifts, and it is said that through this, the fishing net of desires thrown by industrial capitalism can be destroyed.

“The consumption sphere is a very important space where industrial capital’s conspiracy to conceal the fact that consumers are also workers, and furthermore, its strategy to promote consumption by fanning consumers’ vanity, is carried out.
But at the same time, this consumer sphere is also a space of freedom where one can resist the temptations of industrial capital.
Ultimately, the consumer sector was the Achilles' heel of industrial capital, but at the same time, it was a field of free opportunity for humans.
This is why Baudrillard contemplated the realm of consumption, or the objects we encounter in our daily lives.
“Because the same thing can be an object of consumption desired by industrial capital, or it can be an object of enjoyment and affirmation.” (p. 314)

Ferraris: "We are mobilized and subordinated to capital."

Part 5, "Ferraris," delves into the secrets of a new capitalist system dominated by automation and the web, and how self-affirmation can become self-exploitation.
Ferraris understands society as a record, that is, as documentary.
Through this concept, we coolly analyze the new form of capitalism that is reorganizing our lives and inner selves.
He calls the meeting and union between documentary and media the documentary media revolution, and says, “We still don’t understand this revolution.”

As Ferraris said, we are now living in an era of documentary media revolution, symbolized by AI, virtual reality, collective intelligence, the web, and big data.
The documentary media revolution is so revolutionary that it makes even the commercial capital, industrial capital, and financial capital of the past seem outdated.
Ferraris describes this era with a formula.
This is the 'Consumption-Recording-Consumption (CRC)' formula, which is a modified version of Marx's general formula for the movement of capital, that is, the 'Money-Commodity-Money' (MCM´) formula.
The first C in the formula does not mean consumption, such as simple product purchases, but rather the consumption of life and energy that follows all actions performed on smartphones and laptops.
The second R of the formula refers to big data and information about consumption, that is, the records that consumers leave on the web.
The final C is the stage of greedily consuming products available offline or online.


We write things on the web countless times.
These data accumulate every day and become big data.
Who utilizes this big data? Who creates value and reaps the benefits? As Ferraris puts it, "we are mobilized," and in doing so, we become subordinate to documentary media capital.
Ferraris views this daily record-keeping activity as a form of 'work' that creates value.
But documentary media capital never pays the price.
This is no different from working without pay.
So, Ferraris defines the documentary media era as an era in which “self-valuation becomes self-exploitation.”
In such a society, the relationship between rulers and ruled also becomes ambiguous.
More and more jobs are disappearing, leaving only low-paying and high-paying jobs.


So what's the alternative to Ferraris? The problem lies in the fact that documentary media capital monopolizes the surplus value generated by data stored on the web.
This is no different from exploiting the individual users who produced the data.
So, Ferraris argues, let's socialize these values.
He also suggests that we should create a 'data combination' and a 'virtue bank' to counter documentary media capital.
Since it is difficult for individuals to create wealth through the data they leave on the web, the idea is to collect small- to medium-sized data, even if it is not big data, trade it with industry partners, and distribute the proceeds to members.
Then Ferraris shouts.
“Consumers of the world! Unite!”
I urge you to consider how the world would change if consumers united and socialized their data.